President’s MessageTHE BEGINNING OF the year is a greattime to reflect on the previous year’s eventsand to work on setting New Year’s resolu-tions—personal goals that will improve ourlives or careers. It’s a good idea to contem-plate what we might need to do differentlyin order to make these goals a reality.

It’s also a great time to hit the restart
button. I personally prefer the idea of
a “restart button” over a New Year’s
resolution because it means you are
refocusing while acknowledging what
you’ve already accomplished. Everyone owes it to themselves and their
team to reflect on their accomplishments and their personal/professional
goals. Be completely honest with yourself, but at the same time give yourself
a break if you didn’t accomplish everything. No excuses allowed, it is what it
is and life happens to all of us.

Where most of us fail is when we start
a new goal with a bang but quickly fizzle because we are focused on a quick
fix—hoping to reach the goal as fast
as we can. For example, I find January
challenging because the fitness center
becomes crowded with a lot of new
people working as hard as they can.
However, I know if I hang in there until
February most of the people that made
resolutions to get fit will be gone within
three to four weeks. You see, we sometimes expect to see immediate results
and when we don’t succeed, we quit.
While I wish everyone success, I know
we sometimes are not focused on the
right thing.

This year, I encourage each of youto try something different in your per-sonal and professional lives. Decidewhat you want to improve, change,or learn and focus on the process toproduce the result you want. Don’t fo-cus on the goal. Transformation hap-pens because we develop better habitsthrough the rightprocess. Your habitswill produce the results you see for yourteam and yourself. Proper habits hap-pen when we change our thinking, learnsomething new, apply new skills, andinfluence change around us.

Simply changing how we think about
our future can mean the difference between success and failure. Making
small changes each day a little at a time
makes it easier to hardwire new behaviors that are more likely to be sustained
over time. A bonus is that we are less
likely to become overwhelmed when we
stay focused on smaller tasks that produce transformation and success.

Take a moment to establish small incremental changes and calculate what a
one percent difference will make to produce the desired outcome. Then focus
on the quality of the process to attain
that one percent difference from wherever you are today. Daily incremental
habits produce changes that are sustainable in the long run. Next, make a
commitment to focus on a quality process each day, a little at a time. Before
you know it, you will have gained new
knowledge, developed new skills, and
improved your performance.